December 12, 2018

I was over in Fremont County, south of Cañon City, in an area where I used to wander some twenty years ago. Back then, a hike meant following deer trails, arroyos, or an occasional two-track road.

Now there is a trail network. That's a good thing, mostly.

Stumps + rusty iron = trail art

Winter is the time to be out in this country. The sun is bright, there is only a little ice in the shady spots, and the "piñon gnats" of summer — those little bugs that fly into your eyes, nose, and ears — are absent. So are rattlesnakes.

Layers of shale.

I found this little slot canyon that I had not known about.

Tint the photo pink and say that you were in Utah.

Other people knew about it though, as their old graffiti attested.

1901 ??

I learned that some people believe there are dinosaur tracks in the canyon. I have seen tracks in places like the famous trackway out in the Purgatory Canyon. To me, the various dimples in the rocks looked more the result of erosion.

There is a potential for polluting Grape Creek, which brings down the DeWeese-Dye Ditch & Reservoir Company's water from the Wet Mountain Valley to serve hundred of shareholders large and small on the south edge of Cañon City.

For the past several months, Light in the Dark Paranormal — a local
group that specializes in ghost towns and mining sites — has focused its
investigative efforts on the Cokedale Mining Museum, a onetime company
store located in the heart of the former coal mining camp west of
Trinidad.

These investigations, Paul Hill said, were prompted by
reports of unusual activity from museum staff and even Cokedale's town
clerk.

Cokedale's mining musuem.

"We conducted an initial investigation back in February,"
said Hill, joined by his wife Adrian and Louise Bosche in Light in the
Dark Paranormal.

"And we discovered, quite readily and easily in a short
time, quite a bit of evidence."

Evidence, Hill said, that
included an antique wooden wire cutter mysteriously spinning around and
Maglights turning on in response to questions.

That's all well and good. But I wonder if they would have the cojones to go ghost-hunting at Ludlow. Occasionally I visit the monument where the strikers died — the last time was in September — but I go only in the daytime, and the place gets under my skin even then.

July 02, 2017

When anyone fell sick, the first medicine was whiskey, then came quinine and camphor (this camphor prepared at home from the gum and whiskey); then turpentine. One was pretty far gone when one or all of these did not bring him out of it! There was also a good deal of virtue in a chew of tobacco bound on a sore place. I have had many a chew on a cracked toe. Fresh cow manure was also considered good for this, leaving such a white place! For babies with bowel trouble Mama [a "born doctor"] fixed brown flour of which I would steal nibbles, and if this did not help, rose-root tea would, and I would be the one to dig the roots. She was always brewing sage* tea for some tenderfoot, who was getting "climated." Then there was Oregon grape root, brewed with rock candy, supposed to be fine for the kidneys, when juniper and a lot of whiskey were added to it. I have known men in Denver to send to us for the roots, supplying their own whiskey.

Compared to the "Little House" books, Anne Ellis's memoir of childhood and marriages in Colorado mining towns of the 1880s and 1890s (among others, Querida, Bonanza, Coal Creek, and Victor), is relatively un-prettified. Daughter and wife of hard-rock miners, she grows up accustomed to swings between good times and bad, mixed with sudden moves to some other place which everyone knows will be a "sure thing."

Its publication in 1929 meant that it could not be completely unvarnished, but you do pick up some of the slang of the times. When the young miners from Bonanza went to Salida to "get their teeth fixed," the operations took place after dark at a house on Front Street and did not involve dentistry.

April 20, 2014

Today is the hundredth anniversary of the actual Ludlow Massacre, but the ambushes, gunfights, dynamitings, etc. started beforehand and continued for about ten days afterwards.

From the accounts that I have read, the spokesman for the striking miners at Ludlow, Louis Tikas, was himself killed by Colorado National Guardsmen, no doubt "while trying to escape." He was born Ilias Anastasios Spantidakis in Crete.

Louis Tikas

I always heard—and this may just be urban legend—that the legacy of Ludlow is why there are no infantry units in the Colorado National Guard. I don't necessarily accept that as fact, but it is interesting as folklore.

At the height of this conflict, on the morning of April 20, 1914, a
skirmish broke out between striking miners and the Colorado State
militia. This event, labeled the Ludlow Massacre, ended with the deaths
of over 20 people, which included a guardsman, miners, and their wives
and children. The death of children at the Ludlow Tent Colony thrust the
Coalfield War into the media spotlight, with national scrutiny focused
on the Rockefellers, who were majority shareholders in [the Pueblo steel mill and its mines] CF & I [Colorado Fuel & Iron]. In
the aftermath of this tragedy, the Rockefellers and CF & I developed
an employee representation plan that transformed industrial
worker-company relations.

Stop by some time — Exit 27 from Interstate 25 north of Trinidad — and walk the ground.

April 18, 2014

It was a summer day in the mid-1970s and I was driving my ten-year-old Ford pickup down Interstate 25, heading back from Denver to my summer construction job in Taos. (I had gotten a couple of days off; there was a lady involved.)

In my denim clothes and straw hat, I was feeling all southern-Colorado-native-ish, being about 20 years old and preoccupied with questions of authenticity and roots, even though — or because — for eight months a year I was also a student at a liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. (The old pickup had Oregon plates, even while I carried a New Mexico driver's license.)

Then I saw them: two young guys hitchhiking on the south edge of Pueblo, and I figured to pick them up before some cop got after them for being on the interstate. They were from New Jersey, as I recall, going to Santa Fe — and I could get them closer.

We went down the road, talking about their journey West, etc., and to them I was just this guy from Taos with a faint northern-New Mexico accent (courtesy of the crew I was working with). And I decided that they should see Ludlow as part of their Western experience.

We took the lonely exit, bumped over the railroad tracks and past the United Mine Workers billboard over a little rise to the memorial: the statues, the picnic ground, the plaques.

Did I make up some story to leave them out there on the prairie between Trinidad and Walsenburg?

The quickest way to Taos would have been US 160 west over La Veta Pass, then south. But to get there from Ludlow I would have had to drive back north to Walsenburg first.

And I have a memory of coming down the west side of La Veta Pass, getting panicky because the oil pressure light started flickering— worrying that the oil pump was failing (they rarely do). And driving south through San Luis and Questa, heart in mouth, not wanting to break down, only to learn later that it was merely the sending unit going bad that caused the warning light to flicker.

Or was the whole experience an example of road-hypnosis hallucination? I've had several of those over the years.

"He went from this super-abrasive,
'I-don't-need-anybody, I-just-want- to-kill-something' man's man to
somebody who really wants to stop and smell the roses," says Danny
Kirsic, the videographer who has directed Versus filming for all seven
years of Barta's show. "He lives larger now than he ever did. He asks
for help. He's not an island anymore. He knows now that it takes a
village. I like the new Tred."

April 16, 2012

Drive along Colorado 141 in the red rock country of far southwestern Colorado, and you will see what is left of the "hanging flume," originally a ten-mile long wooden trough built high on a canyon wall, part of a hydraulic-mining operation from the 1890s.

But as was done in another era, they use ropes to ease 200-pound ponderosa pine frame pieces and rough-sawn
planks over a cliff face to two men balanced on bits of antique wooden braces 100 feet down the red-sandstone wall. Those men, who rappelled to their spots, fit the unwieldy pieces into what shapes up to be a 6-foot-wide and 4-foot-high wooden trough. The trough is perched on the original wooden braces that look like a long line of number 7s pinned with iron supports into the rock.

Maybe it's just the reporter's style, but how big is the "mystery" here? It's not like we're talking about how they build the pyramids of Egypt or moved the stones for Stonehenge. This was just great-grandad's generation, albeit with hemp ropes, no portable power tools, no hard hats, and at most hobnailed boots for safety gear.

They did not make it into the book, but I had a couple of woo-woo experiences in Cripple Creek and in the nearby ghost town of Goldfield of my own.

In one of them, I was walking into faded glory of the 1904 Teller County Courthouse to cover a hearing about leakage from a cyanide heap-leaching operation killing some horses. Just ordinary reportorial stuff.

I had never entered that building before. At the foot of the staircase leading up to the courtrooms, I almost had a panic attack. I was sure that I was walking up to my doom — but I wasn't "me."

The scene out the windshield was 1980 or 1981 Goldfield, which is to say, not much. But to my ears and inner senses, it was all shouting and turbulence and emotion of the 1894 miners' strike, when the Cripple Creek police shot down the Goldfield constables, mines were dynamited, the militia was called out, and gunfights flared between miners and sheriff's deputies back by the mine owners.

It was like being in two places at once, one foot in the past and one foot in the now. The experience lasted less than minute but left me feeling emotionally exhausted.

When Cockerell arrived, Westcliffe and Silver Cliff were full of miners. On his arrival, he mentions going to Silver Cliff to see the mines.

I was much interested. They find silver here usually in the form of chloride, which is a sort of olive-green, but also, more rarely, they get it native.

And so on for a long paragraph. True, the silver-mining boom had crested when he arrived:

Silver Cliff is the principal place in the district for silver mining, and some years ago when the silver was first discovered there as a great rush for the mines and about 15,000 people were in the place at one time, but mining was not the success they expected, and very soon what promised to become a big town dwindled down to its present proportions--a small and insignificant village.

(Cockerell put Silver Cliff's population at 1,000 and Westcliffe's at 500.)

August 23, 2007

In the early 1980s, when I was a reporter for the Colorado Springs Sun, I spent a lot of time in the old mining towns of Cripple Creek and Victor, on the ghosts-and-gold mining beat. Then in the early 1980s Cripple Creek (but not Victor) got casino gambling, along with Blackhawk and Central City.

(I worked six months once in another state as a slot-machine tech, so I must have been inoculated against the charms of playing them.)

M. and I don't go there much now. For one thing, we moved, and what was then a one-hour trip now takes more like two and a half.

Before the gambling, Cripple Creek was gift shops and lazy antiques shops and bars and the melodrama. There were always the visiting bikers, the miners and former miners and wannabe miners, and the young actors from the melodrama, plus a sprinkling of summer people and a few town "characters." The town was living in the past, but some people liked it that way.

Now it's Zombie Town. The Rambin' Express bus pulls up, disgorges a bunch of retirees, and they go into darkened rooms where lights flash and electronic music that sounds like Eighties video arcade games plays over and over and over. (One of these days someone will prove that that combination accelerates Alzheimer's disease.)

There is not much to do for families when every doorway says "No one under 21 admitted." They could ride the historic tourist train, I suppose.

Over in Victor, always the workingman's town, not so much as changed. White-hard-hat management types stroll in and out of the AngloGold mining office -- the action is at their huge open pit mine that swallowed up the old Cresson mine, which now exists only in the negative space of memory. The associated gigantic cyanide leach pad (a flat-topped mountain of crushed ore) perches ominously at the headwaters of Eightmile Creek.

In Victor they're drinking beer on the sidewalk, selling antiques in a half-serious way, and waiting for the next big thing. Zeke's Bar has moved into a larger space but the Gold Coin bar disappeared in a spasm of gentrification that seems to have abated. The past is always just around the red-brick corner at the end of the street.